Arafat’s Prime Minister

This week, Yasser Arafat appointed Mahmoud Abbas (“Abu Mazen”) as prime minister to run the day-to-day affairs of the Palestinians.

On Wednesday, Arafat then met in his Ramallah office with representatives of Russia, the EU, and the UN, and demanded they put pressure on Israel — now that he has agreed to share powers with a prime minister.

Actually, since Arafat hand-picked Abbas, it does not satisfy the world’s demand for the introduction of democratic reforms into the Palestinian system.

And since it turns out that Arafat is maintaining control of two crucial portfolios — security and peace negotiations — the Abbas appointment also does not satisfy President Bush’s demand for “new leadership not compromised by terror.”

Mahmoud Abbas holds a Ph.D. in history from Moscow’s Oriental College, where his doctoral thesis served as a basis for his 1984 book, “The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism.” In this book, Abbas raised doubts that gas chambers were used for extermination of Jews, and suggested that the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust was “less than a million.”

Abbas also proposed the sickening, bizarre claim that the Holocaust was a joint Zionist-Nazi plot. He wrote: “The Zionist movement led a broad campaign of incitement against the Jews living under Nazi rule, in order to arouse the government’s hatred of them, to fuel vengeance against them, and to expand the mass extermination.”

It was this type of talk that led Austrian Freedom Party leader Jorg Haider and French politician Jean Marie Le Pen to be ostracized by the international community.

Meanwhile, much of the media is praising Abbas as a “moderate” for having criticized the use of armed attacks against Israelis. The same BBC profile reports: “Referring to the current intifada, Abu Mazen has called for a halt to armed attacks on Israeli targets to avoid giving Israel a pretext to destroy the last vestiges of Palestinian autonomy.”

Note that Abbas does not oppose killing Israeli civilians from a moral standpoint; he just finds it strategically ineffective.

Further, in a March 3 interview with the London-based “A-Sharq al-Awsat,” Abbas called for the continuation of armed struggle, and seemed only to rule out suicide missions inside the Green Line.

“Since its establishment, the racist Zionist entity has been implementing various forms of terrorism on a daily basis which are a repetition of the Nazi terror. This proves the shared roots of Nazi and Zionist thought. This also explains the cooperation between the Jews and Nazis during World War II, through which was revealed the forged claims of the Zionists regarding the alleged acts of slaughter perpetrated against the Jews during the same period.” (September 3, 1997)

A PA television moderator declared: “It is well-known that every year the Jews exaggerate what the Nazis did to them. They claim there were 6 million killed, but precise scientific research demonstrates that there were no more than 400,000.” (August 25, 1997)

Hassan al-Agha, a professor at the Islamic University in Gaza City, declared on PA television in 1997:

“The Jews view it [the Holocaust] as a profitable activity so they inflate the number of victims all the time. In another ten years, I do not know what number they will reach… As you know, when it comes to economics and investments, the Jews have been very experienced ever since the days of The Merchant of Venice.”

“They concocted horrible stories of gas chambers which Hitler, they claimed, used to burn them alive. The press overflowed with pictures of Jews being gunned down… or being pushed into gas chambers… The truth is that such persecution was a malicious fabrication by the Jews.” (July 2, 1998)

Furthermore, Palestinians have refused to incorporate any aspect of the Holocaust into their educational curricula, fearing it might strengthen Zionist claims to Palestine. Hatem Abd Al-Qader, a Hamas leader, explained that such instruction would represent “a
great danger for the formation of a Palestinian consciousness”; it would directly threaten Palestinian political dreams and religious aspirations, such as the promise by Allah that the whole of Palestine was a sacred possession to the Arabs. (Al-Risala, Apr. 13, 2000)

And finally, The New York Times (April 6, 1989) reports that Fuzi Salim Ali Madi, one of the leaders of Arafat’s elite unit, Fatah Force 17, selected the moniker “Abu Hitler” and named his two sons “Eichmann” and “Hitler.”